"On a shelf in Panama City, a human skeleton was bundled into a bag within a cardboard box for 46 years. The bones had been looked at once in 1991 and then shelved again. Then one day Nicole Smith-Guzmán, a bioarchaeologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) opened the box and noticed that there was something a little bit different about these bones. The humerus of one arm featured a lumpy calcified mass.
"This turned out to be the oldest known case of cancer in Central America.
"The bones had been excavated in the Panamanian province of Bocas del Toro in 1970 by the now-deceased archaeologist Olga Linares, who had set out to study the agricultural practices of people in the area.
"The bones belonged to a teenager who was probably between 14 and 16-years-old, based in part on the light wear of the teeth, absence of third molars and the degree of fusion between the bones that form the cranium. It was probably a female, but that is hard to say for certain without a pelvis and until DNA analysis comes back. Radiocarbon dating shows that she died about 700 years ago.
"'We see that the people who buried them cared about this person,” Smith-Guzmán says. “This wasn't just discarding the body of a diseased person. We think this was a ritual burial. We can tell that the culture has a sort of ancestor veneration. As well as a care for diseased individuals. They obviously had to be taking care of this person for a while and buried them with these objects of ritual significance as well.'
"The surviving objects buried with the body include several ceramic vessels and a trumpet made from the shell of an Atlantic triton."
For more, please see Smithsonian.com, 30 May 2017, Jackson Landers.
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